Advice to CEOs from Other CEOs

Tag Archives: Tools

Situation: A CEO wants to increase brand awareness for her company and its primary service. The objective is to increase the client base and drive revenue growth. They have identified their primary growth opportunity and differentiating advantage. What else should they do? How do you increase brand awareness?

Advice from the CEOs:

What is lacking is a clear vision, path, and marketing plan. These are prerequisites to deciding either the solution or hiring a high caliber individual to execute the plan.

What steps are involved?

Survey 20% of current clients. Ask “why did you choose us?”

Develop the tools to track and show clients service performance online.

Use these same tools to show company performance online.

Tune messaging to potential clients to highlight demonstrated service performance.

Play elite – as the company’s name and reputation grow, clients should aspire to being accepted as clients.

Think long-term.

What is unique about the company’s ability to manage and extend the longevity of clients’ key assets?

How well prepared are potential clients to manage this on their own?

How does the company help potential clients to manage and extend the life of those assets?

Once there is a clear plan, fine-tune the internal focus of the company to align with the plan.

Increase involvement in communities where potential clients are found.

Situation: A company is in the process of shifting their business model to better address customer needs. They have three different models under consideration. Management is split between these models, but must arrive at a consensus. How do you optimize your business model?

Advice from the CEOs:

Right now, you are considering three different potential models:

Tools – your old model

Data – produced by your old model

Service – your new model

These are different models with different prospects.

The money makers in marketing focus on data, not tools. Data is information, and this is what is valuable to clients. If you want to focus on the data component of your offering.

Currently, you are scraping data from social media and matching this to your client’s database on a real-time basis. There’s a model and value here because you are enhancing your client’s current database by making it more useful and actionable to them.

You have tools to enable and add value to existing client databases by allowing them to better segment their database. Again, there is value here.

Your core IP is the ability to correlate diverse data sources. Have you protected this IP? If not, this needs to be a top priority.

How much information that you scrape from social media sources can you share without violating privacy? This is something to think about because people are becoming increasingly sensitive about companies collecting their private information.

Situation: While funding from banks and institutional sources has been challenging in recent years, growing companies need to fund their growth. How have you funded your company’s growth?

Advice from Hannah Kain:

We focus on frugality and prevent wWhile funding from banks and institutional sources has been challenging in recent years, growing companies need to fund their growth. How have you funded your company’s growthasteful spending. However we invest in tools that enable staff to purchase wisely and stay ahead of customer demands. We also collaborate with vendors to manage costs.

As a result, the last two years have not forced us to change how we fund growth. We are getting large contracts and work globally to solve customers’ logistics challenges. Our challenge has been moving from centralized distribution to strategically placed centers around the globe, increasing inventory costs and cash needs.

Where we have changed is in how we negotiate terms and credit with our customers. We manage vendor accounts payable to maximize cash flow while treating them as business partners. This requires close vendor communications to assure that everyone’s needs are met.

We have been cautious with our banks and seldom dip into credit lines. Managing vendor payments has been more effective.

Essential to vendor communications are open sharing of information and goal setting. We work to create a team atmosphere. This is similar to what we do in our offices. In our experience, instilling the right culture is far more powerful than financial incentives.

We share information through all-hands company meetings and regular updates so that everyone gets the full picture.

We also share information with our vendors so that each side is aware of the other’s needs.

We create an annual one-page business plan for the company, and parallel plans down to the supervisor level. Performance against plans is updated regularly to assure that we remain on top of situations.

We focus training on new tools. Our staff gets technology they need to be successful.

We generously provide technology to our employees, provided that they give a logical business rationale. This includes home computers, iPhones or Applets to help them do their jobs.

Similarly, when a vendor or customer asks for a service improvement or a new service with a good business rationale, we invest to support this.

These methods have allowed us to finance most of our growth internally.